Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
On 25 September 1998, Fernando del Mundo, a worker for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kosovo, made a startling observation. Writing in his diary, he noted that this day was one of particularly intense fighting in the province. His white jeep passed a convoy of Yugoslav government trucks adorned with signs announcing that they contained ‘Social Humanitarian Aid of Kosovo and Metohija’. As they passed, the wind blew up the tarpaulin on one of trucks, revealing blue uniformed special police units of the Serbian Ministry of Interior (MUP).l How was it that these perpetrators of numerous crimes throughout Kosovo came to travel under the banner of humanitarianism? According to Human Rights Watch, these policeman, along with the Yugoslav Army (VJ), ‘have attacked a string of towns and villages’ and what is more, ‘the majority of those killed and injured have been civilians’. 2 Before and during NATO’s Operation Allied Force, VJ, MUP and local Serbian militia forces committed horrendous crimes against the Kosovar Albanian population. Although commentators and Western politicians have been criticised for using the word ‘genocide’ to refer to what happened, under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention, I believe that it is valid to describe what happened in Kosovo between March and June as genocide. 3 After NATO’s operation, extremist elements claiming to be members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) wreaked a terrible vengeance on the Serbian population of Kosovo. Following the deployment of the multinational KFOR force, a series of well-publicised incidents of murder and beatings forced around 170,000 Serbs to flee Kosovo for Serbia and Montenegro. 4 All these examples raise the central question of this essay: what is the value of life in Kosovo? This essay investigates a trajectory of decline in the value of human life from the 1970s to the conflict of 1999.
Alex J. Bellamy (Fri,) studied this question.